Say what you will about Zhang Yimou, the man can build a beautiful extreme long-shot. Otherwise not fit to make their trailers, Yimou’s vast landscapes are as moody as Antonioni’s or Andersen’s, his sprawling back streets as mazelike as Welles’ or Mellville’s, Hero’s grand palace as foreboding as Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. In A Woman, A Gun and a Noodle Shop, Yimou shoots mountainous desert ranges with an eloquence evoking equal parts Sergio Leone and Ansel Adams. It’s just too bad he can’t tell a story as well as he can shoot a panorama.
Based on the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop is a well needed step back from the bloated, increasingly nonsensical Kung-Fu epics Yimou produced last decade. It’s also good for him to be on such solid storytelling ground: even his best films (Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou) suffer from lack of plot direction. He successfully achieves the Coen Bros’ trademark combination of brutal violence and black humor (disclaimer: Blood Simple is the only Coen Bros film, other than The Ladykillers, that I haven’t seen, and I am thus not comparing this to its antecedent but instead their style in general) while simultaneously Easternizing their themes and comedic sense.
Noodle Shop plops Blood Simple’s tale of adultery and revenge down into a small desert compound on China’s Silk Road. Wang (Dahong Ni), rich owner of the compound and titular noodle shop, is a sadistic bastard who tortures his wife every night. Miserable, Wang’s wife (Ni Yan) takes his apprentice Li (Xiao Shen-Yang) as a lover. Learning of their affair, Wang hires crooked policeman Zhang (Honglei Sun) to assassinate the two, but when Zhang double crosses Wang…well, it unfolds exactly as most Coen Brothers movies: a series of tragicomic misunderstandings and mistakes building an ever higher mound of bodies.
But the Coen Brothers don’t just make incredibly tight plotlines, they also write the best dialogue in Hollywood. Yimou, on the other hand, has never been much for characterization, and the dialogue here is as expository as possible. Even when played for slapstick laughs, the script never really comes alive. Luckily for the film, it hardly matters: the second two thirds of the film are almost completely silent. Theoretically, that puts Yimou right in his wheelhouse: visuals, visuals, visuals.
His cinematography only comes in one flavor, fully saturated, and here again we see Yimou’s trademark popping color. But the one big problem with full saturation? It doesn’t work well in the dark. And that’s a really big problem here, because most of this film takes place at night. Rather than night scenes full of crisp, noir-ish shadows, Yimou’s exorbitant, often decadent color scheme drowns in a muddy mess of blues. When he nails it, mostly in the outdoor scenes, it is, as I said above, reminiscent of Ansel Adams, which is to say stunning. But inside, the actors move from pool of light to pool of light, murkily sowing their own doom through a series of poorly conveyed mishaps.
Despite all these problems, however, Zimou manages to reign in his predilection for pseudo-formalism and garish art design (turned up to eleven in the first five minutes but happily never returning) in order to direct a couple of great performances from Yan and Sun and produce some breathtaking shots and gut wrenching scenes. The film’s climax is as nasty and tense as many from the Coens’ oeuvre, and by keeping his cast small and his special effects to a minimum, he manages to recapture some of what it is that made him so (over)admired in the first place. After fifteen years of more or less steady mediocrity, I had more or less written Yimou off as a perennially overrated hack. He’s definitely overrated, but I liked Noodle Shop enough to give him another chances. After all, few directors make Cinemascope so worthwhile.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Quite nice. Almost two hours of behind-the-scenes footage and “making-of” style interviews, from frivolous and fun stuff like watching the actors get make up to serious interviews with Yimou and the actors about the film. Especially nice, the menu breaks these down into separate files so that you don’t have to just watch it all in one big chunk. There are also trailers. The visual quality, especially with the HDMI uptick, is beauteous.
"A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop" is on sale February 1, 2011 and is rated R. Crime, Foreign. Directed by Yimou Zhang. Written by Jianquan Shi, Jing Shang, Ethan and Joel Cohen (1984 Blood Simple). Starring Dahong Ni, Honglei Sun, Ni Yan, Xiao Shen Yang.
